From the rail siding
in Carrera I see
Michaelangelo’s
cold white mountain
sliced block by block.
What once created
La Pieta and David
now reduced to
slices of counter tops.
.
.
.
poem-then July 2, 2014
The dorm rang with
youthful enthusiasm.
We were learning to live,
expanding our limits,
and searching for a future.
So many years
and you are different
and the same.
We’re still learning,
expanding our limits,
contemplating our journeys,
and the next turn of the road.
.
.
.
Had a nice visit with folks I attended college with thirty years ago. So much is different, but so much remains the same whenever you meet old friends, doesn’t it? (It’s that ‘time has pleats’ thing again!)
quote-ghosts June 12, 2014
“The odd sense of calm with which he’d waked was still with him. Something had changed in the night. Maybe it was sleeping…among the ghosts of his own future.”
Diana Gabaldon
Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.
These lines resonated with me. While the character in this scene is being literal, I think we sleep among the ghosts of our own futures on a frequent basis. For example, you know how they say men carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. The ‘hamartia’ or fatal flaw of literary characters occur within our real lives, and who we will be is created by the decisions that we make.
Destinations require both journeys and beginnings. We go to bed with a decision, and we rise with a spectre of our future self as a result.
I suppose this also works in reverse. If we have a ‘someone’ we want to be, we can only get there by the conscious and sub-conscious decisions we make toward that image of ourselves. Just like if you want to be a teacher, you volunteer with kids, graduate from high school, study at university, so there are steps to every image.
If you want to write a book some day, sit today and pound out two hundred words. Tomorrow pound out five hundred. Get your rhythm, Keep writing. Eventually you will have a book, and eventually, you will have readers.
poem- celebration shoes September 2, 2013
I wear my celebrations
sassily, upon my feet.
Stutting to the future,
prancing forward.
No dark days or dreary feet,
in the walk to destiny,
just delightful dancing shoes
shepherding me onward.
.
.
.
My “I finally got a continuing teaching contract!” celebration shoes: Bellevue Sally Skull
My “I survived the slowest drive to and from Vancouver on the TransCanada” celebration shoes: Bellevue Laura Hart. (Yeah. Sometimes any excuse for celebration will do! lol)
They’re both Fluevogs, of course. More particularly they’re both part of the brilliant Bellevue heel family. Bellevues are my favourite Vog style because of their very soft leathers, comfortable height for working all day, and for their fun style that stretches comfortably into the evening. Their motto is “Keeping pushing West beyond your imagination” and they’re named after real Wild West entrepreneurial ladies (ech hem) with very interesting stories.
Here’s Sally Skull’s bio and here is Laura Evan’s. Feisty girls!
poem- time tree August 11, 2013
The tree outside my bedroom window
was the diameter of my skinny child legs:
smooth skinned trunk,
sweet green leaves.
Now, I reach my mother arms
around rough bark,
scrape my wrists as
I stretch to touch
my finger tips together.
There’s summer sun in the scent
of poplar leaves.
I look into the window
searching for my youthful face
gazing out at the future.
poem- it couldn’t be August 1, 2013
No
Why imagine that?
You can’t do that!
That’s not for the likes of you.
No
That’s all they ever said.
I had to stay in this rut
and be what they had settled for
But
my wishes had wings
My dreams dredged deeper
and where I am
is a place of possibility
too great for them to see
Michaelangelo could look
into a rock and see the face of angels
like me
memory June 27, 2013
Here is your memory
a box
a cube
a dream
a fantasy.
Here is your future
exploding
imploding
eroding
Here is
a box
a cube
a dream
a fantasy
exploding
imploding
eroding.
Here:
a box
exploding
a cube
imploding
a dream
eroding
a fantasy
here
future
memory.
Poem: you May 7, 2013
You stand against the
wall, arms crossed, sardonic smile
immune to laughter.
.
You’ve seen darkness that
they can only imagine,
and you are hardened
.
from the admiration
of flirting gazes because
your heart is cold,
.
Frozen by bad maternity
and noncommittal
paternity.
.
Their bad judgements burn
within your heart until
destroying misery
.
means destroying
everything you should love,
innocent or guilty,
.
and then it means
flash firing your future,
scarring your life upon ours,
.
like a victim of
Hiroshima’s bombs whose life
vanishes in an
.
instant, leaving only
a silhouette, burnt white
on blackened walls.
.
.
I’m still processing the recent murder/suicide of a former student. The idea of an image being frozen in memory by tragedy called to mind the silhouettes created in Hiroshima when people’s shadoes were left, though their bodies were vaporized. While at first glance a free verse, the poem has some form: each triplet stanza follows the haiku syllable count (17 syllables per stanza) to reiterate this idea.
learning, looking back, and moving on October 29, 2012
My father asked me tonight if I’d learned anything at ‘that conference’ I went to, and whether I would change anything from my last books as a result.
No.
So it’s perfect, as it is?
Yes, Dad. It’s as perfect as I could make it. I went to the conference for the NEXT book. All the workshops I picked were about the next project.
A little while later he tried again, trying to convince me that I didn’t understand his initial question. Wouldn’t I change things, if I was starting over now?
No. The book is what it needed to be.
He sighed, sure that I wasn’t getting his point.
I know he didn’t get mine.
Every day you’d write a different book. Every day your words are new.
You can’t look back. The last project is finished.
There is no point writing if you’re not trying to write the best book you can, at the time.
There’s not point thinking about what you should/could/would do once it’s out, though. Once it’s in the publisher’s hands, it’s no longer yours to fret over. It’s gone. It has its own life. It makes its own connections with readers.
Luckily, Grace is doing just fine. I don’t have to worry about ways I may have failed her. I poured the best I had into her world. It’s done. She’s being well received. Is she perfect? Well, probably not. But she’s as perfect as I could make her at the time, which means, Yes. She is.
It’s like raising children. You do the best you can, and then you send them out into the world. If your personal imperfections cause trouble for your kids as adults, there’s no point beating yourself up about it, or even contemplating what you could have done differently. You did the best you could at the time, and now you have to look toward the future and doing even better.
Behind us lies the way of madness. There can be no room for regret, only moving forward, to become the best we can be for the next project. We learn to improve for the future, not to improve the past.
Past perfect 🙂
Shawn L. Bird 
field of dreams August 21, 2011
Tags: field, future, postaday2011, short story
I’ve never responded to a short story prompt, but why not? Here is something new for this blog!
An offering for the Short Story slam prompt: http://bluebellbooks.blogspot.com/2011/08/short-story-slam-week-8.html
My grandmother looked over the field of ripening grain and saw into her future. She saw my grandfather driving his beat up ’46 Ford pick-up down the dusty road, saw six babies, saw two funerals, four weddings, and then she saw me.
I was wailing in a cradle, waiting and wailing. The house was filling with smoke. She saw two more funerals.
On the day of the fire, my grandmother phoned my mother. “You be careful, hon.” Grandmother could feel the fire coming.
My mom, she told me later, had laughed dismissively. “Yes, ma.” She had set out the candles and was enjoying the twinkling. She fell asleep on the couch. Dad was in bed, gone to bed early because he was on the early shift the next day. One candle had caught the drapes. The house was engulfed in moments.
Grandmother felt the flames grab the fabric, and phoned. When there was no answer, she called the fire department. They didn’t ask how someone 400 miles away knew there was a fire. They went. They found me, waiting for them and wailing to tell them where I was. My door was shut. The master bedroom door was open. Two more funerals.
And so I came to live with my Grandmother, and to look across the same fields, and to glance into my own distant future.
But that is another story.
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